U.S. to assign 3,000 from US military to fight Ebola

A health worker escorts a woman suspected of having contracted the Ebola virus to an ambulance in Monrovia, Liberia, Sept. 15, 2014.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration is ramping up its response to West Africa’s Ebola crisis, preparing to assign 3,000 U.S. military personnel to the afflicted region to supply medical and logistical support to overwhelmed local health care systems and to boost the number of beds needed to isolate and treat victims of the epidemic.

President Barack Obama planned to announce the stepped-up effort Tuesday during a visit to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta amid alarm that the outbreak could spread and that the deadly virus could mutate into a more easily transmitted disease.

The new U.S. muscle comes after appeals from the region and from aid organizations for a heightened U.S. role in combatting the outbreak blamed for more than 2,200 deaths.

— Set up a joint command headquartered in Monrovia, Liberia, to coordinate between U.S. and international relief efforts.

— Provide home health care kits to hundreds of thousands of households, including 50,000 that the U.S. Agency for International Development will deliver to Liberia this week.

— Carry out a home- and community-based campaign to train local populations on how to handle exposed patients.

Meanwhile, a Senate panel scheduled an afternoon hearing on the crisis. Expected to testify were Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Kent Brantly, an American physician who contracted Ebola while working in Liberia but recovered after treatment with an experimental drug.

Obama administration officials said the cost of the stepped-up effort to combat the disease would come from $500 million in overseas contingency operations, such as the war in Afghanistan,that the Pentagon already has asked Congress to redirect to carry out humanitarian efforts in Iraq and in West Africa. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plans on the record before Obama’s announcement.

The officials said it would take about two weeks to get U.S. forces on the ground.

Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations African affairs subcommittee, applauded the new U.S. commitment. Coons earlier had called for the Obama administration to step up its role in West Africa.

“This humanitarian intervention should serve as a firewall against a global security crisis that has the potential to reach American soil,” he said.

But Republican House Speaker John Boehner faulted the administration’s response.

“Frankly, I’m a bit surprised the administration hasn’t acted more quickly to address what is a serious threat, not just to Africa but to others across the world,” he said Tuesday. He predicted action “in the coming weeks” by the executive and legislative branches of government “to look at how do we best contain this very horrible disease.”

Hardest hit by the outbreak are Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. The virus also has reached Nigeria and Senegal. Ebola is spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of sick patients, making doctors and nurses especially vulnerable to contracting the virus, which has no vaccine or approved treatment.

The U.S. effort will include medics and corpsmen for treatment and training, engineers to help erect the treatment facilities and specialists in logistics to assist in patient transportation.

Obama’s trip to the CDC comes a day after the United States also demanded a stepped-up international response to the outbreak. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, called Monday for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Thursday, warning that the potential risk of the virus could “set the countries of West Africa back a generation.”

Power said the meeting Thursday would mark a rare occasion when the Security Council, which is responsible for threats to international peace and security, addresses a public health crisis.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was expected to brief the council along with World Health Organization chief Dr. Margaret Chan and Dr. David Nabarro, the recently named U.N. coordinator to tackle the disease, as well as representatives from the affected countries.

After leaving Atlanta, Obama planned to travel to Florida to visit the headquarters of U.S. Central Command in Tampa. He will meet Wednesday with military officials about the U.S. counterterrorism campaign against the Islamic State group. Central Command overseas U.S. military efforts in the Middle East.

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